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arXiv:1706.02290 · AIP conference proceedings

How retrocausality helps

Roderick I. Sutherland

Published Jan 1, 2017• 20 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It has become increasingly apparent that a number of perplexing issues associated with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are more easily resolved once the notion of retrocausality is introduced. The aim here is to list and discuss various examples where a clear explanation has become available via this approach. In so doing, the intention is to highlight that this direction of research deserves more attention than it presently receives.

DOI
10.1063/1.4982765

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It has become increasingly apparent that a number of perplexing issues associated with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are more easily resolved once the notion of retrocausality is introduced. The aim here is to list and discuss various examples where a clear explanation has become available via this approach. In so doing, the intention is to highlight that this direction of research deserves more attention than it presently receives.
The notions of identity and indistinguishability are a frequent source of misunderstanding, even among researchers working within the same field. The present text is primarily didactic in intent: it aims to show that a large part of such disagreements concerns the association of different meanings with one and the same word. Six notions are introduced and articulated – qualitative identity and numerical identity, haecceity, operational distinguishability, genidentity and permutational indistinguishability – and their content is clarified by examining two paradigmatic examples in parallel: two quantum particles and two occurrences of a word in a text. It is argued that the monadic version of Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles is violated both by bosons, which can occupy one and the same state, and by fermions, for which indistinguishability operates in spite of Pauli’s exclusion principle, as the statistical counts make evident; the status of weaker relational versions of the principle remains contested. In the concluding part, the linguistic example is reread in the light of the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics, for which it ceases to be merely an analogy and becomes a genuine explanation: on this interpretation, absent information can signify an absence of reality rather than mere ignorance.
It has been suggested that some of the puzzles of QM are resolved if we allow that there is retrocausality in the quantum world. In particular, it has been claimed that this approach offers a path to a Lorentz-invariant explanation of Bell correlations, and other manifestations of quantum "nonlocality", without action-at-a-distance. Some writers have suggested that this proposal can be supported by an appeal to time-symmetry, claiming that if QM were made "more time-symmetric", retrocausality would be a natural consequence. Critics object that there is complete time-symmetry in classical physics, and yet no apparent retrocausality. Why should QM be any different? In this note I call attention to a respect in which QM is different, under some assumptions about quantum ontology. Under these assumptions, the option of time-symmetry without retrocausality is not available in QM, for reasons intimately connected with the fundamental differences between classical and quantum physics (especially the role of discreteness in the latter).
In this paper, I explore the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics. Often explanations that invoke consciousness to help explain some of the most perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics are not given serious attention. However casual dismissal is perhaps unwarranted, given the persistence of the measurement problem, as well as the mysterious nature of consciousness. Using data cumulated from experiments in parapsychology, I examine what anomalous data with respect to consciousness might tell us about various explanations on quantum mechanics. I examine three categories of quantum mechanics interpretations that have some promise of fitting with this anomalous data. I conclude that explanations that posit a substratum of reality containing pure information or potentia, along the lines proposed by Bohm and Stapp, offer the best fit for various categories of this data.